Buried Treasure: part one
a serialized story published weekly
This has been a rough few days in the United States, and I think we could all use some whimsy and joy and adventure, and fiction unrelated to the current national and global mess. I’ve also been fascinated for some time by the serial fiction that’s being published now, and the centuries-long tradition it belongs to. I love the idea of reading a story in regular installments, and how the experience of waiting for more, and wondering what comes next, changes how you read. I’m also interested in publishing a piece on my own terms, independently.
So I’m dusting off an old story from grad school. I love this particular narrative, but I’ve never been able to find a home for it, in large part because of its length—somewhere between a short story and a novella. The story is complete, and I have enough material for several weeks of posts, but if people express interest I might consider writing more. This is pure fiction, but it’s set at William and Mary during my college years, and captures a specific moment in my youth, when I’d fallen in love hard. When the world was young too, anything was possible, and every speck of reality had meaning.
Buried Treasure
(Or when we were pirates)
This winter I live in a drafty old house on the island. When I got this house I pictured myself curled up on the couch, a mug of hot chocolate beside me, but even that is too much, too rich. I drink steaming hot water instead, for the clarity it gives me, and because I want to be a monk. Winter on the island is recluse time – time without tourists, without suntans, without a need to speed on highway 12. It would be sacrilege to go to the tanning bed – winter is the time for my skin to lose its sun-drench, time to hear mice scurrying in the attic, time to turn off the television and listen to the wind.
Wind off the water is always stronger than wind off any other thing. Sometimes we walk on the beach, bundled up so much I look like a penguin, and the sea spray still gets me right in the face, and the salt makes me think of all the things I've given up.
When the snow flings itself onto the shore, so that it almost looks like sea foam after a storm, winter feels like it shouldn't be winter. But the beach is more than suntan lotion and trashy novels and sand castles. We have built our castle here. We have made promises.
And so we huddle on the island, not sure what time it is or what happens next. Alone with each other and the mice and the salt.
But there was once a different kind of winter, a winter when I was younger, and I know you’ll think that I’m just reminiscing about my youth, romanticizing it, making it grand when it was only made of copper. But this was the winter that we became pirates. There were chemical reactions in the air, along with poetry and Schrodinger’s cat and that buzzing that either signals mosquitoes or a reversal of history. The twentieth century was drawing to a close, and I had just started dating Jimmy T., and as result I was one of the guys.
#
Winter that year at the College of William and Mary felt like the ground was frozen deep down to the center of the earth, and the chill on our faces was splintery, crackling with all the stored-up energy that would release when spring came. It had snowed several inches, which didn’t happen much in southern Virginia. Jimmy T. and I had made out in an igloo we’d built in the Sunken Gardens, next to snow sculptures of elephants and dogs and televisions built by other students. I remember sitting in the snow, leaning against the side of our igloo, his lips hard on mine, his right hand sneaking up underneath my winter coat and my sweater and my T-shirt. I was not wearing a bra. I only stopped him when I thought we might get frostbite.
I’d thought I was a lost soul before I met Jimmy T., thought my life would be taken up with jerk boyfriends and jerk husbands, thought I’d have to learn how to make a casserole, thought I’d never write anything that I cared about. But then came Jimmy T. with his mountain bike and black T-shirts with silly messages on them. And he swept me up into his whirlwind. I could still feel the wind rushing around us and between us, still get a bit of hurricane when he grabbed me and kissed me.
He and Wilson were both computer science guys, but secretly Wilson wanted to go study orangutans and Jimmy painted surreal landscapes of classrooms, vast classrooms filled with animals inappropriate to any syllabus and people stretched so thin they must have been made of taffy. He considered himself an experimentalist. Sometimes at night he read me Ginsberg and Kerouac, driving me nuts by snapping at the end of every line. Even in On the Road, which of course is prose.
I was a poet. For years I’d written things that made no sense – they were kind of Jabberwocky – but lately I’d broken the gibberish up by mixing in coherent lines. The change still scared me, and Jimmy had to kiss me extra nicely before I went to workshop.
in the fading light of the sun I was
whole.
without withered fingers,
or moldy toes,
or bees for eyes
On one of those snow days, I was sitting in Jimmy T.’s room with him and his roommate Wilson. We were listening to old Bobby Brown and I was drawing little devils all over a letter the dean had sent me. I liked the music because it was like popcorn over a fire or bacon sizzling early in the morning. Bobby Brown was giving me a little more soul, a musical cadence for my civil disobedience. I didn’t care about the letter, but my parents were always trying to get me involved in political causes, telling me that only boring people got bored. I did not want to be boring. I wanted to live the kind of life that made people gasp, whether in admiration or disgust.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Jimmy T. and Wilson were remarkably clean, for boys, and there was nothing but me on the floor. Wilson was stretched out on the top bunk of the bunk bed, watching Jimmy playing a video game. On the dark screen, my boyfriend’s spacecraft zoomed around, chasing green blobs of aliens. Every so often one of us would throw out an idea of a way to spend our evening. Jimmy tended to scoff at any idea that he thought was mundane. So going out to a movie or dinner at the Chinese buffet was out. So were a series of less mundane ideas.
“Steam tunnels!” Wilson said.
“No point,” said Jimmy as he shot an alien dead on the screen. “How about we steal some lunch trays from the cafeteria and go sledding?”
Wilson rolled his eyes.
I was barely paying attention to this conversation because I had to figure out whether I could tell the dean the truth, that in response to some atrocious poetry submissions to my lit magazine where I was the poetry editor, and considerable goading by my boyfriend, I’d sent out rejection letters on paper towels. This had all been really funny one late night in December, but it apparently wasn’t as funny to the dean. I had run out of paper in my printer, and rather than go steal more from the computer lab, we had raided the bathroom’s supply of paper towels. Jimmy had helped me tear each sheet of grayish-brown paper into fourths, so that I could write terse rejections in black sharpie. We had decorated them with little trees and suns and long rivers that stretched around the messages. The letter said that I needed to apologize “officially,” but this seemed like a first amendment issue to me.
I had just underlined a choice phrase of the dean’s: inappropriate use of school-sponsored activities, when Wilson said suddenly, “I’ve got a weird idea.”
I glanced up at him. Wilson was always getting weird ideas. Two weeks ago he’d had a weird idea that the boys’ bathroom was haunted because he swore he’d heard “ghostly whistling” every morning for a week straight. The whistling had vanished, and we still hadn’t found the culprit.
I was getting bored of Wilson’s weird ideas.
“What about?” Jimmy T. asked as his video game alter ego shot at an alien and missed.
“Let’s do it. Let’s be the ones who find the treasure. Women’ll swoon.”
I could not imagine women who would normally not swoon at Wilson swooning at Wilson if he found a treasure. He was attractive enough, but even now he had this fresh-faced twelve year-old look to him, with his feet dangling over the bunk. Besides, the whole concept was ill-formed. “I think women swooning is a myth,” I told him. “Either it never happened, or it went out with corsets.”
Jimmy laughed and said, “I’ll buy you a corset, Wilson, but I will not talk any more about that damned treasure. It’s boring.”
“It’s not damned,” Wilson said, his face going red like a character in a cartoon. He was like this sometimes.
“It’s damned impossible to find, and if Prof. Kashti can’t find it, I’m sure as hell not that cool.” He went back to the video game and in a few minutes he had leveled up, so that he was now flying a huge, silver spaceship, diving towards aliens in style.
I went back to my letter, but after a while asked, “How long have you guys been talking about this?”
“Freshman year, week one,” Wilson said. “We got a campus tour, and the dude took us right up to the first clue. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. The treasure’s buried on campus. Right there for the taking.”
“So they say,” Jimmy snapped.
“So a lot of people say.”
“I’ll concede that.” Grinning at me, Jimmy said, “Haven’t you ever heard of it? The Thomas Jefferson Treasure?”
I had not.
“Somebody, years ago, carved a message into that statue of Jefferson. You know the one near the Sunken Gardens, where he’s … I don’t know he’s got this flair to the way he stands, it’s flamboyant, with his hand on his hip, and he’s looking off into the distance?” When I nodded, he started talking again, faster now. “On his back, if you look really carefully, it says, ‘If you seek an adventure, come on ours.’ And then there’s some numbers. We think it’s code. But nobody knows what it is or where the next clue is.”
“How do you know about this?”
“Like Wilson said. A couple of the tour guides talk about it in the spiels. We heard about it our first week. But it’s comp sci legend. My professor talks about it like it’s the holy grail. But,” he said, looking hard at Wilson, “Nobody knows how to find it.”
I laughed. I still hadn’t figured out my boyfriend, let alone his roommate. Originally Wilson had seemed like a sidekick, a bit character in Jimmy’s life, but the more I got to know them, the more Wilson seemed like a real character. I wasn’t sure if Jimmy T. would do anything without his goading. The strangest thing about all this was the way I’d become wrapped up in Jimmy T.’s life. I’d had a half dozen boyfriends before him, but they’d always been on the periphery. I certainly hadn’t hung out with their roommates or friends. Jimmy was a good lay, but he was more than that. I’d been spending so much time with him lately that my roommate said she was getting “worried” about me.
“But Jim,” Wilson was saying, “this dude in my anthro class, he knows something. He really knows something. There’s supposed to be a desk in Swem, in the library, with the next clue on it.”
“Wilson why don’t you just go get your anthro friend to investigate the ghostly whistling? The two of you can do an ethnography on people in college who sit around with too much time on their hands.”
“You’re getting cynical.”
“I’m not getting cynical. Ruthie?”
“Not at all, babe. But if this guy knows where it is, why doesn’t he just crack the code? It can’t be that hard. It’s on the back of a statue.”
“Prof. Kashti’s theory is that the code on the statue doesn’t function on its own, it needs the next clue, and no one’s found it.”
Wilson gave a long, elaborate sigh. When we were both looking at him, he said, “So we’re back to the desk in Swem.”
Jimmy T. finally shut off his game. “You know they’re renovating,” he told Wilson. They both looked sad for a while. And then I realized something.
It all depended on a desk in the library. One desk.
I could see myself as a rogue atom in a chemical equation, making something ignite.
Biting my lip, I murmured, “I copied all the graffiti on all the desks in Swem. It was an independent study.”
Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “You did that for school?”
“I wrote an epic poem called, ‘The Slut Goddess Meets Profane Frat Boys and Talks about Poe.’ ” Now I was getting nostalgic for that dumb graffiti project. I remembered filling a notebook with all the stuff people had written on those desks in the last fifty years or so. I liked just holding that notebook when I was done, flipping through the pages to see that I’d almost filled it up.
*The opening section of this story was originally published, in slightly different form, as a standalone story in Extract(s). It was also a finalist in Ropewalk Press’s short short fiction contest.*
[To be continued next Friday 1/31/25]
My husband and me—standing in front of Jefferson dorm, the setting for much of this first installment, as well as the building where we met and fell in love. Just like Ruthie and Jimmy T. We didn’t go on a treasure hunt, but I like to believe that if the opportunity had presented itself, we would have risen to the call to adventure.